When I first heard about Amnesty International, as a cynical college student back during the Vietnam War, I wasn’t very impressed. I was told they wrote letters to dictators asking them to release political prisoners. Yeah, I thought. Like that will touch some fascist’s heart.
Then I read about Julio de Pena Valdez, a union leader in the Dominican Republic, who had been thrown into prison years earlier. Amnesty International began a letter-writing campaign. As Valdez told it, “when 200 letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes. Then the next 200 letters came, and the prison director came to see me.
“The letters kept coming and coming – 3,000 of them. The president was informed. The letters still kept arriving and the president called the prison and told them to let me go.”
I found that overwhelming. I realized I had been dead wrong. Writing polite letters to tyrants didn’t sound nearly as sexy as organizing a guerrilla force in the jungle, but if it worked, who was I to criticize? Over the years, I have come to have more and more respect for the Geraldine and Ken Grunows of this world—quietly decent men and women.
They aren’t flamboyant, they don’t make grandiose statements; they just keep on getting it done, fighting for people they don’t even know, something we all wish someone would do for is someday if we were ever falsely accused or jailed. That can happen even here.
But imagine being tossed into prison in a country where there is no right to have a lawyer, no right to know the charges against you, no real protection against the power of the state.
Amnesty got its start because of a case like that. Peter Benenson was a 40-year-old lawyer in London back in 1961. He’d been educated at a prestigious school. His life was good.
But one day he read an article about two Portuguese students who spent seven years in prison just for drinking a toast to liberty in a bar in Lisbon, back during the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar. He decided to overwhelm the Portuguese government with written protests – then realized that wasn’t enough, that what was needed was to draw attention to the plight of political and religious prisoners of conscience all over the world.
That was the beginning of Amnesty International. The first American chapter was founded five years later. In recent years, some of their campaigns have offended longtime supporters, including letter writing campaigns on behalf of prisoners on this country like Leonard Peltier, jailed for the murder of two FBI agents, or any number of inmates on Death Row, or foreign nationals we have captured and locked up at Guantanamo Bay.
Israelis and American Jews have been offended when Amnesty has taken up the cause of Arabs felt to be unjustly accused and imprisoned. To me, however, this is just further proof of Amnesty International’s integrity, and an indication that some people care about justice in this severely flawed world. What they may do most of all is give people hope.
Ginetta Sagan understood that. She was an Italian-born Californian who devoted her life to establishing Amnesty International in this country. As a teenager, she’d been jailed and tortured by Mussolini’s fascists, and managed to keep her sanity after one day she found hidden in a bread roll a single word: Courage.
Amnesty International tries to give courage to the unfairly imprisoned every day. What they give me is hope for humanity.
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